Try this on for size: Do we educate our children because they “deserve” education? What does a child have to do to “deserve” education? It is illuminating to tabulate just which schools get more money per child, and which get less. Is this decision made on the basis of the childrens’ righteousness, or some other basis?
What if we educated our children not because they deserve it, but because we want to have a nation of educated people? What if I demand my tax dollars be spent to make America a better, stronger nation?
More and more it seems like conservatives don’t actually have any solutions, just broad, ham-fisted dismissals. Or perhaps they know the “solutions” they touted in the past (lower taxes, deregulation, small government, reliance on the free-market to solve all problems) never really pay off, just increase inequality and poverty. You can’t constantly tell people “you need to work harder for less money and everything will be all right . . . if you’re lucky” and expect them to buy it unless you also use some kind of bogeyman like “communist dictatorship.”
“You know, I’d really like better wages, state-run health care and public education, I can definitely see that making my life better, but if it means we’d have to accept slave labor camps and mass executions just like they have in Denmark I guess I can do without.”
Watching the “faux” “news” interview with her, I got the impression she heard the word “socialist” and immediately shut down the part of her brain that does critical thinking. That’s a dirty word to those repubs…
And some people have never learned that Saint Ronnie’s “government is not the solution to our problems, government is the problem” dictum was nothing but a corrosive statement intended to erode people’s faith in anything so that Republicans’ fuck-ups would be seen as “working as intended” and not some fundamental flaw in need of correction.
This isn’t limited to Right-wing columnists, I hear the most fear, snide and lies from Democratic centrists/establishment moderates regarding A O-C, Democratic Socialists and Progressives. She is a lovely young Democratic Socialist, with hope and courage for rebuilding America going forward, it is only too bad that we don’t have millions more like her active in modern American Politics, we’d end up a better, more fair, nation.
I follow a few Hillary-lovers on Twitter and only a few days after AOC’s win they were busy trying to undermine it, or finding that AOC was on some board to help candidates but then, shock horror! she ran herself. Nothing’s good for these people. And then there’s the “Bernie was helped by the Russians too!” crowd, all of whom are Dems.
It’s a great show, style-wise. Anyway, when someone mentions “democratic centrists”, it always makes me think of the clock numbers sliiiiiding off to the right.
